In what was an amusing reminder of our ape-like selves, Rachel Mayeri presented a series of videos on primate "soap operas" for human and chimpanzee audiences.
In her video, Primate Cinema: Baboons as Friends, a split screen showed raw footage of Kenyan baboons' mating behaviour shot by primatologist Deborah Forster and juxtaposed with a reenactment by human actors in film noir style. "A tale of lust, jealousy, sex, and violence transpires simultaneously in human and nonhuman worlds. Beastly males, instinctively attracted to a femme fatale, fight to win her, but most are doomed to fail. The story of sexual selection is presented across species, the dark genre of film noir re-mapping the savannah to the urban jungle."
In Primate Cinema: Apes as Family, a drama of a female chimpanzee's friendship with a "wild group of foreigners", Rachel creates a multi-perspective viewing experience. The one screen shows a dramatised film enacted by a human actor dressed as a chimpanzee and the other shows the 'TV screening' for the chimpanzees in a zoo by having a TV placed in their habitat.